Golf club head manufacturers and designers seek to improve certain performance characteristics such as forgiveness, playability, feel, and sound. In addition, the aesthetic of the golf club head must be maintained while the performance characteristics are enhanced. Golf club manufacturers often must choose to improve one performance characteristic at the expense of another. In fact, the incorporation of new technologies that improve performance may necessitate changes to other aspects of a golf club head so that the features work together rather than reduce the associated benefits. Further, it is often difficult to identify the tradeoffs and changes that must be made to ensure aspects of the club head work together to achieve the desired performance.
In general, “forgiveness” is defined as the ability of a golf club head to compensate for mis-hits where the golf club head strikes a golf ball outside of the ideal contact location. Furthermore, “playability” can be defined as the ease in which a golfer can use the golf club head for producing accurate golf shots. Moreover, “feel” is generally defined as the sensation a golfer feels through the golf club upon impact, such as a vibration transferring from the golf club to the golfer's hands. The “sound” of the golf club is also important to monitor because certain impact sound frequencies are undesirable to the golfer.
The United States Golf Association (USGA) regulations constrain golf club head shapes, sizes, and moments of inertia. Due to these constraints, golf club manufacturers and designers struggle to produce a club having maximum size and moment of inertia characteristics while maintaining other desirable head characteristics, and designers have narrowed their research box to focus on ways to improve performance within these constraints. However, once a designer makes the decision to design outside of these USGA constraints, they are faced with a myriad of design considerations that do not arise when operating within the comfortable constraints they have worked within for years. In fact, many of the technical relationships found to improve performance while operating within the constraints do not improve, and may negatively influence, performance of a golf club head that is significantly larger. The disclosed embodiments tackle these issues.